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Via @exiledonline, I learned today (July 18) that Canadians are
richer than Americans. This is rather surprising, since GDP per
capita is higher in the U.S than in Canada.: $48,100 vs. $40,300
(at purchasing power parity or PPP), according to the CIA World Factbook. But in fact things are
much worse than that, as 15 OECD countries (plus Singapore and
Taiwan) have higher median wealth than the U.S. does. There may
even be more, as the Credit Suisse report I discuss below does
not give median wealth data for several countries with higher
mean wealth than the U.S.

Most reporting has been based on a story that was run in the
June 30th Globe and Mail claiming
that average (mean) Canadian household wealth had reached
$363,202 vs. just under $320,000 in the U.S. This is not a
particularly informative statistic, however, since wealth is even
more unevenly distributed than income, and income in the U.S. is
already highly unequally distributed. What we really need is
median net worth, i.e. the level at the exact middle of the net
worth distribution in a country. G&M commenter "TJMone" picks
up that point, receiving an answer from "porkbarrel pundit": a
Credit Suisse report from October 2011 (via
LSM Insurance), shows that the median net
worth per adult in Canada was $89,014, compared to just $52,752
in the U.S. (all figures in U.S. dollars).

American reporting based on the study in the G&M did not
start until 18 days later, when an article in U.S. News & World
Report picked it up (Canadians are right: no one in the U.S.
is paying attention to them). Moreover, no one picked up on the
much better data in the Credit Suisse report until later in the
day, when Dylan Matthews at Wonkblog wrote a great story
on it (there are many high-quality comments, too). It turns out
that lots of OECD countries, including economic basket cases
Italy, Spain, and Ireland, have higher median wealth than we do.
See the chart below:

Source: Dylan Matthews, based on data from Credit Suisse

It is mind boggling that median Australian net wealth per adult
is four times that of the U.S., and Italy is three times as high.
Ireland and Spain, meanwhile, are also higher despite having
housing busts similar to that in the United States. What is going
on here?

Part of the answer is more equal income distribution. According
to the Credit Suisse report, mean wealth per adult is just shy of
5 times median wealth in the U.S., whereas in Canada it's a
little less than a 3:1 ratio (see Table 7-1). Other countries
with higher median but lower mean net worth per adult are Taiwan,
Finland, Germany, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand,
and Spain. Australia has a higher mean net worth than the U.S.,
but its ratio of mean to median net worth per adult is less than
2:1.

Another part of the answer may be that in many other wealthy
countries, households have less debt. If you remember Michael Moore's
movieSicko, in one scene he interviews an
upper-middle class French family and asks them what debt they
have. Their only significant debt is their mortgage, because they
didn't have to take out loans to go to college. The Credit Suisse
report finds this pattern (unfortunately, only mean debt, not
median debt). Mean debt per adult (see Table 2-4) is $59,362 in
2011 for the United States, whereas for France it is $40,873,
Germany $33,424, and Italy only $24,291. Of course, this isn't
true of all countries: Ireland and Switzerland both have much
higher mean debt per adult, but they also have about twice the
median wealth per adult of the U.S.

This analysis is hardly exhaustive; I bet a good book could be
written on the subject.

One final point: Matthews skewers the claim by Globe and
Mail author Michael Adams (whose firm conducted the study
discussed in his article) and later commenters on both sides of
the border who accepted Adams' claim that this was a historical
first. As he shows with U.S. and Canadian government data,
Canada's median household net worth was significantly higher in
2004-5, before the crisis, than here in the U.S. Given the huge
disparities between the United States and some of the other
countries, it is likely that net worth per adult has been higher
in a number of these countries for quite some time. These data
reflect trends that have been developing for a long time, and are
not purely driven by the economic crisis or by any single set of
policies. But they make for sobering reading, and deserve more
than the superficial analysis most of the U.S. press has given
them so far. Bravo to Matthews for a great piece of
analysis.